#Survival

"We could do it, you know.""What?""Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give values to survival."

"War is not for winning, Masha,"sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving."

"Humor - I see it as a survival skill."

"Tough times don't last, tough people do, remember?"

"We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't."

"Humor is one of the best ingredients of survival."

"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

"To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival."

"The masculine energy was about survival. The male was the hunter who risked his life and had to be in the fight-flight mode."

"Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. That is the sole test of survival and success."

"What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer."

"There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success."

"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself."

"Mother can beat me all she wants, but I haven’t let her take away my will to somehow survive."

"I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day."(Interview with The Booklovers blog, September 2010)"

"I told Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson, then age 105, that she was the only person over 80 who I'd ever met who never referred to her physical infirmities or health problems. To which she replied, "I have my difficulties; I do not rejoice in them."

"Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience."

"Humor keeps us alive. Humor and food. Don't forget food. You can go a week without laughing."

"We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving."